President Bashar al-Assad has announced his candidacy for presidential elections in June, confirming his intention to stay in office despite years of civil war.
With President Assad determined to remain in power, will the regime or the rebels ever be capable of gaining the upper hand?
BBC Diplomatic correspondent James Robbins explains.
A team of US robotics experts have put together a pop group of flying drones, who will play a string of live dates this weekend.
Daniel Mellinger, a former student of Pennsylvania University and co-founder of KMel Robotics, talked to the BBC about how the band was formed.
The robots will be performing at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, DC, in a bid to recreate before a live audience what they previously achieved in the recording studio.
Video Journalist: Dougal Shaw
Drone footage courtesy of KMel Robotics; Visual and musical direction by Kurtis Sensenig and Dan Paul respectively
Paul Simon and his wife Edie Brickell have appeared in court charged with disorderly conduct.
Simon, 72, told a judge they were "fine together" while Brickell, 48, said her husband was "no threat to me at all".
The pair, who have been married for more than 20 years, were arrested after police were called to their Connecticut home, on Saturday.
Concerns raised earlier this month about a lack of long-term vision for education in Wales were highlighted over six years ago but the findings were not made public.
BBC Wales has seen a confidential document from 2007 which details weaknesses in strategy and teacher training.
Hywel Griffiths reports.
Volkswagen - Europe's biggest carmaker - will announce its latest financial results on Tuesday and they are expected to be record-breaking.
VW, which makes car brands ranging from Audis to Skodas, is expected to announce it is now selling 10 million vehicles a year.
Operating profits are expected to top $16bn.
But some analysts say all this success could be masking some fundamental problems at the company as Jeremy Howell reports.
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The "twerk fail" clip appeared to show an amateur dancer setting fire to herself A video of a twerking routine gone horribly wrong has won one of the internet's highest honours.The "Twerk Fail" clip, which was later revealed to be a fake created by US chat show host Jimmy Kimmel, was named best viral video at the Webbys.
Other winners included the Guardian newspaper, which was honoured for its interactive coverage of the NSA leaks.
BBC News also won two "people's choice" awards, for its online mobile site and also for its news language sites.
The mobile site won in the category for News (handheld devices), while the BBC News language sites on responsive took the award in the best practices category.
The Webby Awards were established in 1996 as a way to recognise "excellence on the internet," according to the company's website.
There are dozens of categories, each with two winners. One is decided by a jury from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences - which includes Netflix star Kevin Spacey and Ariana Huffington - and the other voted for by the public.
Pharrell William's epic 24-hour-long video for the Oscar-nominated single Happy won two prizes Actor and stand-up comic Patton Oswalt will host this year's ceremony to honour the winners in New York next month.
Other big-name winners included Jay Z, who was given a prize for the app accompanying his latest album, Magna Carta Holy Grail.
His wife, Beyonce, was named the people's choice in the fan website category.
Pharrell Williams won the Webby and People's Voice Award for best use of interactive video, thanks to a 24-hour music video for his hit song Happy.
Will Ferrell's Funny Or Die website won three prizes, including two for Zach Galifianakis' spoof talk series Between Two Ferns, which recently starred US President Barack Obama.
Holiday rental site Airbnb and Twitter's video app Vine also took prizes, while The New York Times was named the best news website.
Jimmy Kimmel hosts the late-night show Jimmy Kimmel Live on US TV network ABC Jimmy Kimmel's "Worst Twerk Fail ever" video was posted on YouTube last September and gained nine million views before the talk show host revealed it had been a set-up.
The clip appeared to show an amateur dancer twerking against a door in her apartment, before falling over onto a table and setting fire to her leggings.
But a "director's cut" of the video, broadcast on Kimmel's nightly show ended with the presenter appearing from behind a door and putting out the flames with a fire extinguisher.
He also revealed the supposed star of the video, Caitlin Heller, was in fact a Hollywood stuntwoman called Daphne Avalon.
Romantic fiction publisher Mills & Boon has caused a stir in the publishing industry by creating its own app for reading ebooks.
The ebook market is currently dominated by digital superstores run by the likes of Amazon, Kobo and Apple. They take a percentage of the profits each time a book is downloaded.
Mills & Boon has created its own app reader to streamline the process from publisher to reader. It is hoping that a rise in the number of people reading ebooks on smartphones and tablets - as opposed to dedicated e-readers like Kindle - will make their gamble pay off.
But will they be successful, and will other publishers follow suit?
Dougal Shaw reports.
Across the world big businesses are worried about finding and keeping talent.
Good candidates may get more than one offer or be headhunted by a rival.
Chief executives tell leadership expert Steve Tappin about the best ways to recruit and retain staff.
An American journalist who was kidnapped and held hostage for several days last week by pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine has been describing his experiences.
Simon Ostrovsky says he was pulled out of his car and taken to the basement of a local security building by armed men.
He told Newsnight he was blindfolded, had his arms tied behind his back, and was thrown to the floor and beaten up.
Pilot, trade union rep, member of parliament, cabinet mister, member of the House of Lords, cookbook writer- what else could life offer a man like Norman Tebbit?
His latest incarnation is as a children's writer, and his latest book features a talking Labrador.
The central character is a 14-year-old boy who is left paralysed after a car crash which kills his father.
Lord Tebbit's wife has been in a wheelchair since the bomb explosion at the Conservative party conference 30 years ago.
He spoke to Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman about his children's book.
One of the most complete tyrannosaurus skeletons ever found is being moved from Montana to Washington DC. There, hundreds of millions of people will eventually be able to view it.
Inside a museum basement in Montana, a small team of scientists have been preparing a dinosaur for an extraordinary road trip.
Bones the size of a child and others that are mere fragments have been examined, photographed, checked off lists, placed in cushioning cradles and packed in 16 wooded crates.
The BBC's Jane O'Brien shows how it is done.
Produced by Jane O'Brien and David Botti
Additional photos and video courtesy Museum of the Rockies
Do we need a new social network? Twitter co-founder Biz Stone thinks so and has launched a new app called Jelly which he hopes will encourage people to help each other out.
But with Reddit, Yahoo Answers and Quora offering similar services, LJ Rich takes a closer look at Jelly to see if it can break the question and answer mould.
Watch more clips on the Click website. If you are in the UK you can watch the whole programme on BBC iPlayer.
Wage increases have finally risen above the rate of inflation, after four years of falling living standards.
Weekly pay, including bonuses, went up by 1.7% in February, according to the Office for National Statistics.
It comes as new figures show that unemployment fell by 77,000 in the three months to February, to just under 2.25 million, a larger fall than expected.
Hugh Pym reports.
Would greater controls on gun ownership save lives or simply limit freedom? It is the debate that renews after every mass shooting in the US.
In August 2012 six people were shot dead at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin by a white supremacist.
Frustrated by the lack of action in Congress and what he deemed insufficient attention to the massacre by President Barack Obama, the son of one of the victims is running for Congress on a gun control platform.
James Coomarasamy reports on Amar Kaleka's upstart challenge to 2012 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan.
Produced by Lindle Markwell; filmed and edited by Peter Murtaugh
Altered States is a series of video features published every Wednesday on the BBC News website which examine how shifting demographics and economic conditions affect America on a local level.
Pilot, trade union rep, member of parliament, cabinet mister, member of the House of Lords, cookbook writer- what else could life offer a man like Norman Tebbit?
His latest incarnation is as a children's writer, and his latest book features a talking Labrador.
The central character is a 14-year-old boy who is left paralysed after a car crash which kills his father.
Lord Tebbit's wife has been in a wheelchair since the bomb explosion at the Conservative party conference 30 years ago.
He spoke to Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman about his children's book.
People in the Americas have been treated to a rare celestial show as the Earth's shadow fell across the Moon.
The Moon appeared to change colour from orange to blood red during a total lunar eclipse.
Science correspondent Jonathan Amos told BBC World what caused the "blood moon".
It wasn't too long ago that Asia's best and brightest business students looked overseas for top-notch education.
The Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the entrance exams for MBA programs, says that's changing.
More students are electing to stay at home for their studies.
Sangeet Chowfla is the global president and chief executive of GMAC. He told the BBC's Rico Hizon how the region's universities are becoming much more competitive.
Watch more reports on Asia Business Report's website.
A big change can seem like the answer to a big problem.
In one bound a chief executive can radically change the direction of an organisation, says management expert Steve Tappin.
But big change can also cause great unhappiness, as eBay boss John Donahoe discovered.
A leading UK site for parents and the Canadian tax authority have both announced they have had data stolen by hackers exploiting the Heartbleed bug.
Mumsnet, which says it has 1.5 million registered members, said that it believed that the cyber thieves may have obtained passwords and personal messages before it patched its site.
The Canada Revenue Agency said that 900 people's social insurance numbers had been stolen.
Rory Cellan-Jones reports.